Kernel developers learn, one way or another, to be careful about memory
use; any memory taken by the kernel is not available for use by the actual
applications that people keep the computer around to run. So it is
unsurprising that eyebrows went up when Joel Fernandes proposed building
the source for all of the kernel's headers files into the
kernel itself, at a cost of nearly 4MB of unswappable, kernel-space memory.
The discussion is
ongoing, but it has already highlighted some pain points felt by Android
developers in particular.

In software, we tend to build abstraction layers. But, at times, those
layers get in the way, so we squash them. In a talk at SCALE 17x in
Pasadena, CA, Kyle Anderson surveyed some of the layers that we have
built and squashed along the way. He also looked at some of the layers
that are being created today with an eye toward where, how, and why they might
get squashed moving forward.

Version 8.0.0 of the LLVM compiler suite is out.
"It's the result of the LLVM
community's work over the past six months, including: speculative load
hardening, concurrent compilation in the ORC JIT API, no longer
experimental WebAssembly target, a Clang option to initialize
automatic variables, improved pre-compiled header support in clang-cl,
the /Zc:dllexportInlines- flag, RISC-V support in lld."
For details one can see separate release notes for
LLVM,
Clang,
Extra
Clang Tools,
lld, and
libc++.

Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom
Conservancy (SFC) first heard the term "sustainability" being applied
to free and
open-source software (FOSS) four or five years ago in the wake of Heartbleed. He wondered what the term meant
in that context, so he looked into it some. He came to SCALE 17x in
Pasadena, CA to give his thoughts on the topic in a talk entitled "If Open
Source Isn't Sustainable, Maybe Software Freedom Is?".

Mozilla has released Firefox 66.0. The release
notes contain details. New in this release: Firefox now prevents
websites from automatically playing sound, improved search experience,
smoother scrolling, improved performance and better user experience for
extensions, and more.

Python versions 3.5.7 and 3.4.10 have been released. Both are in
"security fixes only" mode and are source-only releases. This is the final
release in the Python 3.4 series. The 3.4 branch has been retired, "no
further changes to 3.4 will be accepted, and no new releases will be made.

Version 4 of the
Solus distribution has been released. "We are proud to announce
the immediate availability of Solus 4 Fortitude, a new major release of the
Solus operating system. This release delivers a brand new Budgie
experience, updated sets of default applications and theming, and hardware
enablement."
LWN reviewed Solus in 2016.

By the time that 5.1-rc1 was released and
the 5.1 merge window ended, 11,241 non-merge changesets had
been pulled into the mainline repository. Of those, just over 5,000 were
pulled since the first 5.1 merge-window
summary. It often happens that the biggest changes are pulled
early, with the emphasis shifting to fixes by the end of the merge
window; this time, though, some of the most significant features were saved
for last.

Linus has released 5.1-rc1 and closed the
merge window for this development cycle. "A somewhat recent
development is how the tools/testing/ updates have been quite noticeable
lately. That's not new to the 5.1 merge window, it's been going on for a
while, but it's maybe just worth a mention that we have more new selftest
changes than we have architecture updates, for example. The documentation
subdirectory is also quite noticeable."

Your editor has never been a prolific blogger; a hard day in the LWN salt
mines tends to reduce the desire to write more material for the net in the
scarce free time that remains. But, still, sometimes the desire to post
something that is not on-topic for LWN arises. Google+ has served as the
outlet for such impulses in recent years, but Google has, in its wisdom,
decided to
discontinue that service. That leaves a bereft editor searching for
alternatives for those times when the world simply has to hear his
political opinions or yet another air-travel complaint, preferably one that
won't vanish at the whim of some corporation. Recently, a simple
blog-hosting system called WriteFreely
came to light; it offers a platform that just might serve as a substitute
for centralized offerings.

Here's a
SUSE press release hyping its transition to being "the largest
independent open-source company". "As it has for more than 25 years,
SUSE remains committed to an open source development and business model and
to actively participating in communities and projects to bring open source
innovation to the enterprise as high-quality, reliable and usable
solutions. This truly open, open source model refers to the flexibility and
freedom of choice provided to customers and partners to create
best-of-breed solutions that combine SUSE technologies with other products
and technologies in their IT landscape through open standards and at
different levels in their architecture, without forcing a locked-in
stack."

Thomas Haller writes
about the WireGuard integration in NetworkManager 1.16.
"NetworkManager provides a de facto standard API for configuring
networking on the host. This allows different tools to integrate and
interoperate — from cli, tui, GUI, to cockpit. All these different
components may now make use of the API also for configuring WireGuard. One
advantage for the end user is that a GUI for WireGuard is now within
reach." (See this article for more
information on WireGuard.)

When Leaderless Debian was written, it
seemed entirely plausible that there would still be no candidates for the
project leader office even after the extended nomination deadline passed.
It is now clear that there will be no need to extend the deadline further,
since three candidates (Joerg Jaspert,
Jonathan
Carter, and
Sam Hartman)
have stepped forward. It seems likely that the wider discussion on the
role of the Debian project leader will continue but, in the meantime, the
office will not sit empty.